The Modular PC: Intel’s New Element Brings Project Christine to Life | Hacker News Reader

The Modular PC: Intel’s New Element Brings Project Christine to Life

anandtech.com

45 pointsrbanffy46 comments

> Way back at CES 2014, Razer’s CEO introduced a revolutionary concept design for a PC that had one main backplane and users could insert a CPU, GPU, power supply, storage, and anything else in a modular fashion. Fast forward to 2020, and Intel is aiming to make this idea a reality.

1994 called. It wants it PICMG 1.0 back.

edit: https://www.picmg.org/openstandards/pci-isa/

1987 has been on the line with AUTOCONFIG [0], but the call was disconnected in 1995 after being transferred a half dozen times to clueless sales departments

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoconfig

1974 called. The Altair wants its backplane back.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-100_bus

Oh how I missed that. And I actually have an 8800b.

Passive backplanes are a convenient way to organize modular machines with multiple boards. I really don't get why someone would want this, however. We already have motherboard and chassis standards and upgrading them is trivial.

And I retro-envy you. ;-)

Native Instruments PXI backplanes are made for scientific instruments so you throw on a couple of mobo modules with modern intel CPUs hooked up through the PCI backplane lanes to RF generators, motor controllers, sensors and diagnostic equipment like spectrometers, network analyzers, etc. The backplane comes with more specialized power sources and a bunch of other stuff too.

If you need, for example, a network analyzer hooked up to an SDR that can live decode and compare tens of gigabits of sensor data to the output for validation and tuning you might need several CPUs ingesting and processing that data talking to another CPU that actually runs the SDR software and so on. For these kinds of scenarios, a few PCIe cards and a rack really isn't enough (or cheaply available) compared to a PXI backplane.

Believe it or not it was a dumpster save from work. I was tasked to clean out the "attic" which built up decades of computing and industrial control hardware. In addition to the 8800b I took home a complete IBM system 23 and Franklin Ace 1200.

That name triggered memories of AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS

I never noticed this, heh. Indeed If those two files were made into a protocol that is automatic, user-transparent, and active at the BIOS layer then it's a pretty good portmanteau on both semantic and conceptual levels.

Amiga systems did not have any meaningful user-facing configuration settings at the hardware level; bus-level peripherals following the Zorro II/III spec Just Worked (tm).

Ask and you shall receive (a modern 8088 design that uses a backplane): http://www.smbaker.com/building-an-xi-8088-pc

That reminds me of the RC2014[0], a Z80 based system that uses a backplane.

[0]: https://rc2014.co.uk/

I'd be real interested in a 16-bit version of this board (PC-AT Compatible). I'd also be real interested in an assembled one.

So looks we're coming back around to S100-style "motherboards" that were more correctly called "backplanes"; but with PCIe the interconnect instead of basically the CPU pins extended to slots.

Interesting these appear to have their own RAM. Similar to how the Pentium slot CPUs had cache RAM on the slot chassis.

RAM (slots) has to be on the same board as the CPU due to signal integrity.

also just direct performance - ram speeds these days make line length important (it's why there are some fun swirls in the traces - getting identical timings is important and measurable)

> We asked about RGB LEDs

Nobody can say Anandtech has lost sight of the priorities of the enthusiast community :-D

<groan>

On the other hand, we recently had to build a thermal test fixture at work, and used off-the-shelf watercooling equipment from "enthusiast PCs". I think we used the cheap, no-LED version though :p

I don't really follow how this is different from normal, motherboard-based desktops, which are already modular. Can anyone explain?

Well, it's less modular. Though with Intel CPUs needing a new mainboard for every single CPU generation, maybe not a big deal.

That's the point I came here to make. My initial reaction was that this was a step back in modularity, but upon reflection I realized that every time I've upgraded my CPU, I've also had to upgrade my motherboard. CPUs (these days) are a long-lived part, so by the time I get around to changing my CPU more often than not I also end up changing the motherboard, and even the RAM. I think someone like me, someone who values the customizability that one gets by assembling their own system but also doesn't upgrade more than once every three or four years, would be an ideal customer for Element. It's an open question, though, as to whether there are enough people like me to be a worthwhile market.

Current desktops have two levels of modularity: a PCIe bus connected to the motherboard which various things are plugged into, and then a set of special components (like CPU and RAM) that get plugged into the motherboard directly. This is different in that it makes the PCIe bus the interface for all components, and the "element" housing the CPU and RAM becomes just one more thing that plugs into it.

In theory this makes tasks like upgrading the CPU easier, since you wouldn't need to deal with things like the old and new CPUs using different sockets; you'd just pull out the old Element and plug in a new one, the exact same way you upgrade (say) your GPU.

There are (in theory) downsides too, of course. If the CPU moves into a sealed package, for instance, your options for cooling it are going to be limited to whatever fans/etc. come on the package; you wouldn't be able to buy and use beefier third-party coolers, the way you can now since you have direct access to the processor. That's not a huge issue for most people, but if you're an overclocker it'd be a serious pain point.

Isn’t PCIe a little slow compared to (say) qpi? Won’t this just mean you’re waiting on memory more often?

Presumably it's a case where the speed has gotten fast enough that we can sacrifice some of it for other benefits

I think this has the memory on board the CPU card, so it shouldn't affect anything there. What i'd be worried about is the total number of pci-e lanes exposed by the slot for the cpu, that'll bottleneck most systems these days thanks to nvme storage and other peripherals.

POWER is getting there. Their OpenCAPI stuff allows one to attach all kinds of stuff, from coprocessors to memory. Large boxes will end up having separate connected CPU and memory drawers on the rack.

But that's no desktop computer.

QPI/UPI is not used in single processor systems. DMI is literally PCIe. You would however need quite a number of PCIe lanes to achieve the bandwidth of a 128 bit DDR4/5 interface.

I think the only thing to add to this is the GPU side of computing has accommodated for modifying/upgrading the stock coolers.

Here's a thought:

What if, instead, Intel began keeping a single socket revision alive for longer than 1 release cycle of CPU?

This seems like the fundamental issue. I remember ~20 years ago when there were only 2 sockets for x86 to worry about: Intel P4 & AMD Athlon. Motherboards lasted at least a generation or two, it was nice.

I wonder if they consider that a feature, and not a bug.

Don't want people slagging off your cool new CPU when it's actually their old mobo bottlenecking things.

Memory bandwidth. You can’t make the code run faster without more ability to move data to and from mamory.

All questions about modern CPU architecture get down to two questions of first principle: How much memory bandwidth is available? How is the available die area being used?

This is not true at all. I think you might mean memory latency. Modern CPUs are primarily designed around memory latency.

Very few programs are limited by memory bandwidth. At that point you have done a good job of optimizing already.

Most people don't upgrade frequently enough for it to matter; letting people put a new CPU into a 4-5 year old motherboard may be more of a disservice. If you do upgrade frequently then you just need to consider the cost of the motherboard as part of your upgrade cost.

It never mattered to me, when it came to upgrade I always had to upgrade the motherboard as well, thus ending up buying a full PC, as in Portugal there was hardly any monetary benefit building yourself the PC vs buying a new one.

This sounds like ancient zeroeth-generation PCs that used things like the S-100 bus:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-100_bus

This was also a single bus that almost everything plugged into.

Apple's Mac Pro is moving this direction with the new IO Card hosting the USB/thunderbolt/audio connections. These trends definitely come in waves.

Yeah, this seems to come and go every 7 or 8 years. Always breaking with the previous attempt while still trying to achieve the same thing. Probably contributes to the reason some of the industrial modular stuff moves so slow.

If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

I feel like this would limit the number of PCIe lanes you could pull off the cpu though unless there was some black magic trickery happening here

Looks like a cooling nightmare.

Looks like a laptop squished into a GPU form factor

So, they reinvent s-100 bus computers ?

Modular pc's, but on top of Intell.

Yeah, that's a fundamental mistake. I'm not seeing what problem they want to solve also. PC's are the most modular hardware I have.

Worked a while as a PC technician. Something like this would've saved a lot of time and effort when testing/replacing parts. I don't see what's wrong with more modularisation.

I don't see it as more modularisation -if I understand that word correctly - there are less configurable elements than on a PC it seems. What can you substitute here that you can't on a pc ? Or maybe it's the fact that you can add several elements in it, I.e. it's a blade server ?

Well, right now, if you want to buy a new CPU, you have to buy a new mainboard. Modularized in this way, you buy the add-in card which contains RAM slots and new socket/CPU. So you don't need to buy a new mainboard anymore. Explain how there's less configurable elements.

Not saying there are less configurable elements but I fail to see how there are more. How is the cpu/memory board different from a main board for standard users ? What will prevent the back plane from being obsolete with new cpu boards ?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com